


The Bright Side

by pettiot



Series: Professionals Timeline [15]
Category: The Professionals (TV 1977)
Genre: Depression, M/M, Reunion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-05
Updated: 2011-05-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:47:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22241299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pettiot/pseuds/pettiot
Summary: Doyle's having a bad decade.  After years apart, Bodie just walks back on in.
Relationships: Doyle/Bodie
Series: Professionals Timeline [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1600894
Kudos: 2





	The Bright Side

It had to be the pills. Booze alone had never made him hallucinate. Desperate to escape from the image, black clad, shiny surfaces agleam in the streetlight, he veered right until the wall interrupted, only to find one hand still clinging to the knob. He was well and truly in his own way, unable to slam the door.

'No better then?' Terse, businesslike.

Doyle thought about that carefully before he answered. 'S'not as if I ever really felt any better. So I can't be any worse.'

'Mm. She warned me. Can I come in?'

'Who warned you?'

'Who d'you think? I went to your house.'

'Not my house any more.'

'Yeah, she made that clear. Consigned to the investment property, you. Can I come in?'

Morbid this need to know. Sick. 'How is she?'

Bodie met his eyes, disadvantaged by the threshold step into an angle of head and neck somehow beseeching.

'Can I come in?'

'How is she?'

'What do you want me to say? Stick her in the corner and you could read books by the bloody glow. Kicking you out was the best thing she did in her life. She looks fantastic. Even put some weight on at last. Got a haircut. Looks a million quid. Didn't hear any tenors singing in the bedroom, mind you, but when she wasn't bawling me out, swear to God she was making eyes at the guy next door doing his lawn. Is that what you want to hear?'

Doyle undulated away from the doorframe, into his hallway. Finding the correct rhythm for forward progression seemed vaguely impossible. Bodie watched him, inching inside. The kitchen door. They stood on opposite sides of the counter. Doyle wondered if he had walked backwards the whole way, he couldn't recall looking away from Bodie the once.

Bodie had a knapsack and a bike helmet. He dropped the former in a corner of the kitchen, propped the latter on the bench, checked the empty fridge, then went and took water from the tap without a single comment about the dishes.

'You look like you need to sit down.'

Doyle thought about that, too.

'I like to move very carefully now. Just in case. I collapse.'

'I've always admired that about you. When you do a thing, you give it your all. Even when it's liver failure.'

'She told me I had to get out. Wouldn't want the kids to find Daddy strung up from the light socket. I swear I wasn't that bad. Or at least. I never fucking let on, did I?'

Bodie, coolly. 'What kids?'

'Yeah, s'what I said. Upstairs had kids, they were always coming down to use our yard. And that was the other thing she said. What kids. What do you say to that?'

'Nothing.'

'Nothing. Then the next thing you know.'

'Yeah?'

'No wife.'

'Too bad. Hey, look on the bright side. At least there's no kids.'

Doyle went to put his face in his hands without lifting his elbows from the counter. Bodie caught him on the rebound and took him to a chair, which was angled so Doyle could squint at the abandoned knapsack. At moments of focus, it was well worn, stuffed, one buckle at the end of the strap, the other unfastened. Dusty, too. During moments of fuzz, it looked like something very important, and tugged at a painful thread of thought.

'So where've you been this time?'

'Oh.' And Bodie was looking away, face scrunched up, uncomfortable. 'You don't really want to know.'

'Need to know. Bullshit.'

'No, not that. I'd tell you anyway. You just don't want to know.'

No, he probably didn't. Shameful to admit those years he had spent thinking of Bodie with a vague, self-satisfying pity for the man; never found a career after CI5, drifted. Driving trucks, hanging out with Doyle's friends, charming up Doyle's wife, feeding off the reality of others. Ex-soldier cut loose. On the run. Wounded, pushed too far, renegade. No hope for a career recovery. Skint half the time, so much so he never even brought Doyle round to see his place. Sure, Doyle had imagined it. Single bunk in some grey flat. Hookups in some seedy bar. No matter how close they had been, the competitive edge between them never really dulled, and after CI5 Doyle had thought himself well ahead in this game of life. It wasn't gloating, but in his generosity he had been — so very fucking _aware_ of what riches he had available to share.

Only to find out Bodie had never really been an ex anything, mercenary or soldier or highly trained government expendable. Maybe some his lies had been the truth. But certainly he had never been quite cut loose, nor on anything less than than the extravagance of a government contractor's danger money.

The very memory of his own generosity made Doyle curl up inside. Shame, humiliation. Anger. Bodie should have _told_ him. Except Doyle hadn't wanted to know. It had felt so good, thinking himself the only success. As for now—

'You're back then?'

'Yes.'

'When you off again?'

'Trying to get rid of me this soon? It's been three years since the last...Christ, I can't even remember. I just thought you might like a chat. Catch up a bit. Then I found out and thought you might like proper company— Look, shall I just go?'

A jolt, deep in his gut, a pain so unbelievable Doyle couldn't let himself believe it happened, or he'd be screaming.

In his memories, a clear gap of three years, a chasm of time during which he could not recall even the shape of things. But if he stared into it deeply enough, there was a hint of something there, like remembering what it felt like to be interested in things again. People. Stuff.

'No, don't.' Quietly. 'Sorry.'

'All right. Have your water. Sleep it off. I'll be here when you wake up.'

'Bodie. Wait. Tell me. Where you've been. I do want to know.'

'When you wake up.' They were stumbling down the corridor now, which was endless. Eventually, Bodie propped him against the pillows, and patted his shoulder, awkward and endearing. 'All right?'

'You're not leaving so soon.' A parody of politeness, hospitality.

'No, I said I'd be here. See, when I got off the train I thought— Well, it was either Liverpool or London, and I wasn't looking forward to crashing on my old man's sofa. I went to yours and the lovely Camille nearly ripped me a new one. Then I remembered when you bought this place you said it was a two-bed.'

An expectant silence, while Bodie looked abashed. Doyle felt suddenly too tired even to be led to conclusions.

'Have you actually got a spare bed?'

'Oh. Yeah. Mattress in the other room. Up against the wall.'

Uncomfortably, still not looking at Doyle. 'So can I stay a while?'

The dusty, overstuffed knapsack flashed into Doyle's mind, this time seen through a fog.

'Where've you been? Don't they have, I dunno. Barracks for you or something?'

'No. No, look, I'll tell you. And tomorrow, when you don't remember a thing, I'll tell you something else.' The bedsprings creaked as Bodie propped himself on the corner, staring fixedly at nothing. 'I was out on a job when it just struck me. The why of it all. I never left CI5 off my own bat, you know that, and these contract jobs were just as good. But you know what I always said about CI5, and it was the same working for _them_. If you ever ask why, that's when you know it's time. So I just left it.'

'Walked out.' That pain again, sharp enough Doyle nearly curled into himself. Bile flaring in his throat. It had to be the pills. Or heartburn.

'It was a bad time. I left a job hanging. They said they couldn't let me go, too much knowledge. But it's not like the old days, no hits against our own, specially not when all they've done is—'

'Walk out.'

'Right. No crime to run away, eh, copper? So they put me into this place to make sure I wouldn't—' Bodie's blank expression suddenly ripped apart, a fragile mask, anger and self-mocking untrammelled. 'To think, Doyle. People get paid for administering this so-called therapy.'

'People pay for it. You'd do it if someone paid you for it.'

'Huh, maybe. The blind pissing on the blind. At least I didn't have to fund it. Lived good and cheap these last six months, rent free. And I managed to miss out on Christmas due to being in there. Most depressing time of year, Christmas.'

'Yes.' Almost a hiss; in his memory gap, last Christmas was particularly blank. It had to be, because there had been a fight, and a remorse so strong he should have died. A very violent — No. There had been nothing. Blankness. Christmas. Just another time of year. Nothing painful to remember about it at all.

'Mm.' Bodie was lost somewhere in his own memory, frowning. 'I didn't see the point of the whole exercise, it wasn't like the bastards were going to make me talk about myself, or take any flipping pills I didn't want to take. So you know what they insisted on? Group therapy.'

'The blind pissing on the blind.'

'But six months rent free is also six months not earning. So here I am, Raymond. Penniless. Certifiably sane, for what that's worth, and you still haven't said if I can stay.'

'I still haven't said if you could even come in.'

'"Yes, Bodie, of course you can stay. As long as you like. Thanks so much for taking me for granted, only a true friend would ever do that. Nothing's reliable in this life, not your job, not your wife, but you — you take me for granted no matter what."'

'Pissant.'

'Your vocabulary's deteriorated.'

Doyle was angry, in a rush of unexpected motion, but rendered impotent to articulate it by his weeks of debilitation. _Angry,_ and right wretched with it.

Because you drifted, and drifted, and drifted, marooned, starving, alone, whatever, then suddenly one day you were walking the perimeter of your island having resigned yourself to this — existence — and there he was, casually saying hello like it had just been yesterday not these _decades_ of slow growing spaces, the juddering, grinding, forever-expanding sense of having done something wrong, so consuming it was as though life contained nothing but for the dread of wrong-turnings long since taken and irrevocably lost. Then, insouciant, he insisted he'd been there all the while, actually, sleeping with you, cheek to jowl.

'Could you not think of any less of a melodramatic way to do this?'

Bodie grinned, delighted with the anger, perversely so; probably saw it as a return of the familiar. 'I don't know what you mean. Do what?'

'Oh, for—' Come home. Compete for the title of the world's most pathetic ex-operative— competitive even here, bloody hell. Move _in_ , after the weirdness post-CI5 when Doyle had _thought_ they might— but Bodie had obviously _not thought_ , then disappeared for the first time, and then again, and again. The rebellion was draining out of him now. 'Never mind.'

'It'll come to you,' Bodie said, patronising in his comfort. He patted Doyle's shin, stood, then paused by the door. 'You. Er. Well, thanks anyway. I appreciate it.'

'It's nothing.'

'Yeah, it is. But thanks. Doyle?'

He looked up, and saw Bodie's expression suddenly serious. Not blank, not angry, not focused. But no trace of the joker there, so he looked almost a stranger, with the greying hair and blurred features, new shapes and lines imposed on the long years of memory; a stranger, maybe worth knowing.

'Didn't live so long, either of us, to string ourselves up from the light socket. So do me a favour, Doyle, and don't go choking in your sleep tonight. Not tonight, when I've just come home. It'd be really insensitive of you.'

'Christ,' on an unstoppable rush of breath. 'I don't know why I ever missed you.'

  



End file.
